


Four Times Sherlock and John were Amazing Parents, and One Time Mycroft Was Too

by SkipandDi (ladyflowdi)



Series: Moments from the Infiltrate Universe [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Child Neglect, Families of Choice, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 05:09:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4733867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyflowdi/pseuds/SkipandDi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about the Holmes children, in five parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Times Sherlock and John were Amazing Parents, and One Time Mycroft Was Too

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series of vignettes Skip and I wrote that we've put together for the first time. Please note the tags above. There is reference to the abuse each of the adopted Holmes children experienced before coming to live with Sherlock and John. If that is a trigger for you, please do not read on.

1.  
Waking up after surgery is always the worst. Andrew never expects things to stay dark, and with the drugs it's all so disorienting. He usually ends up throwing up, not sure where his hands or his feet are and where is up and which is down. It always takes a while for things to stop being so syrupy slow, and until he can make some kind of move he's stuck, his brain whirling upside down and backwards in his head, spinning so fast it scares him.

His papa notices though, can tell when Andrew is coming out of it somehow. He sits on the hospital bed and shifts Andrew around, until Andrew's head is on his chest, his ear pressed over his father's heart. It's better like that, less dizzying and not so scary. If he knows where his head is he can figure out the rest of him, and Papa has his hand on in Andrew's hair, pressed against his skull, which is good, makes it so he doesn't feel so lost.

"How do you feel?" Papa asks. The words rumble against Andrew's ear.

"Revolting," Andrew mumbles against his father's shirt.

"You sound like yourself," Dad says from in front of Andrew. His hand squeezes Andrew's, and Andrew is grateful for that too -- he'll be too big for that later, when he can see again. Kids who can't see are allowed to curl up in their parents' laps and cry, it's a rule.

After a while the drugs start to wear off, which is good, but then the itchiness starts, which is bad. He can't even cry it out because of the stitches, it just sits there in his eyes until he feels like he's going mental, absolutely barmy. "I hate this," he mutters pathetically.

"It's only for a few days," Dad says gently. He feels Dad press a kiss to his temple. "Dr. Chin was in a bit ago. He said we can go home whenever you're ready." 

Andrew groans. "I just wanna go back to sleep."

"When you're home," Papa says. He starts to sit up and Andrew makes a noise of protest, grips his fist in his papa's shirt. Car rides are nauseating like this, and his eyes _hurt_ , he doesn't _want_ to -- he just --

"Hush, Andrew, calm down," Papa's saying, his fingers shifting through Andrew's hair. Andrew sucks in a breath and swallows, his throat too tight. "It'll be fine, I promise." 

It's okay like that, things still make sense. "Okay," he says, and takes a deep breath. "Okay, I'm ready."

" _Courageux bichounet_ ," Papa says, quiet enough that Andrew feels the words in his chest more than hears it. Papa only ever calls _him_ that, and only when Andrew is being tough like his Dad. Just hearing it makes Andrew feel brave.

"Let's go," Andrew says sternly, and thrusts his arm out like the commanders did in war, back when they used cannons and muskets. 

He hears Dad snort. Papa says placidly, "The door is behind us, Andrew."

"Then turn around so I make sense," Andrew says, and Papa complies, and they are on their way.

 

2.  
John gets the call at ten o’clock in the morning.

He loves his children, he really does, but honestly there are times he utterly despairs of them. This week alone Monica has called him four times between her classes to say hello (she was going through the clingy phase that Lucy had also gone through, and John chalked it up less to being adopted, more to the experiment Sherlock had cooking on the top floor of the house), two calls from the head teacher at St. Bernadette’s (Andrew was amassing a frankly alarming army of minions and no one knew to what purpose, only that he had to be stopped), and one call from the preschool (Kaden was seriously considering diapers for the rest of his days, and John knew this because one only had to put him in pants to have him, miraculously, wet himself).

One call he hadn’t expected was the one he got while he was with a patient, an elderly woman who didn’t mind that his hand shook a bit when he tried to put the blood pressure cuff on her. “Excuse me,” he says to her, and steps out of the room to answer. “Lucy?”

She’s whispering, and with the general noise of the surgery he can barely hear her. “Lucy, you’ve got to speak up. Are you alright? What’s wrong?”

“Daddy,” she whispers, and John ducks into his office and closes the door behind him. His daughter has been crying, he can hear it in her voice – he picks up his office line and dials Sherlock. “What wrong? What’s happened?”

“Daddy,” she chokes out, and John says, “Where are you? Tell me this instant.”

“In school,” she says, crying, and his heart is a vice – worse still when Sherlock’s phone goes to voice mail. “In the loo. Daddy something awful has happened.”

“In the loo, or in school?”

“In the loo. To me!”

John grabs up his coat, rushes across the hall to Sarah’s office who takes one look at him and sighs. “Sorry,” he mouths, and hands her Mrs. Planchett’s records, and within a minute he’s out in traffic, hailing down a cab. “Did someone try to hurt you?”

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Lucy sobs, though something very clearly is wrong and he’s unbelievably frustrated that he isn’t at St. Bernadette’s right now. 

“Lucy, what’s happened? When I get there I just can’t tell the secretary that my child called me bawling from the girl’s loo. Do I need to stop at home and get clothes?”

“Yes! No. I don’t know,” she cries, and he’s alarmed that she’s nearly hysterical. “Daddy I went to the loo after lunch and there’s blood on my toilet tissue and it’s on my panties too and I don’t know what to do _please help me_.”

John’s heart climbs completely into his throat and he has to swallow at least three times before he can respond. “I’m coming love. I’ll be there in less than five minutes. I want you to put your clothes right and go to the nurse and wait for me there.”

“Daddy—”

“Do as I’ve told you,” he says gruffly. “I’m coming.”

He calls Sherlock five times in the five minutes it takes for him to get to St. Bernadette’s. That Sherlock doesn’t pick up is grounds for divorce. Or perhaps homicide.

 

.

Lucy is, as John expects, an utter wreck when he gets to St. Bernadette’s. The nurse is torn between amusement and sympathy, John can tell, and he doesn’t give a right goodly damn that he offends her by calling her an ancient old bag who can’t see when a child is in distress as Lucy, sobbing hysterically with a blanket around her shoulders, clearly is.

He’s never been the sort to hide things from his children – he’s already had The Discussion with all of them, mostly because he’d never had it with his own mum and he’d grown up thinking the natural responses of his body were wrong, and dirty, and to be hidden and ignored. He knows Lucy knows what’s happening to her body, but as he crouches down in front of his daughter, all he can see is the tiny girl Sherlock pulled out of that closet, pale and tiny and forgotten.

“Lucy,” he says gently, and she throws her arms around him like she hasn’t done since she was little.

They stop at the Tesco on the way home. John is a doctor and a soldier but lord above he’s a parent first, and his stomach swims and his head gets light and he is unbelievably thankful for his cane today when he finds himself standing in front of a veritable wall of female protection.

Lucy looks up at him, eyes wide and beseeching, and John calls on good old fashioned English stoicism to get him through. “We just have to look for the right ones,” he says, praying his ears won’t start turning red. “Why don’t we stay away from tampons for the time being.”

“Why?”

Oh, _so_ many reasons. “Tampons are more suitable for older teenagers and adult women. If I remember correctly, your Aunt Harriet was in secondary when she started using them.” When Lucy simply stares up at him John adds, “Tampons can cause Toxic Shock Syndrome, which is something I haven’t talked to you about and which we should discuss before you decide if you want to use them. For now I think you should wait until after you’re more comfortable with your cycle, but it’s up to you.”

She turns brightly, fiercely red. “Okay,” she replies in a small voice.

“Let’s take a look at the menstrual pads.”

This doesn’t help the situation at all – if anything, taking the three steps down the aisle introduces a multitude of new ones.

There had to be over a hundred different types and brands of pads on the shelf, all advertising different flows, ultra-thin or maxi, with wings and without, with core absorption, with cotton blends, with scent technology. John studies each of them and has never felt more out of his depth – judging by the look Lucy gives him, she agrees with this assessment. He’s had girlfriends, he has a sister, but this just wasn’t something he had ever been asked to do. He was a doctor, but for heaven’s sake all he knows about pads were what women used after giving birth. He honestly doesn’t think his little Lucy needs anything of the sort.

So, John does what any parent would do – he begins to study each box, reading each label carefully to acquaint himself with the thousands of different types of feminine protection. He catches the pitying looks from other shoppers and _hates_ it – he’s a good parent to his child, he can meet her needs just like any—

“I wish my mum was here,” Lucy says.

Jesus Christ. When he looks down Lucy is staring at the ground. Her cheeks are wet. “I miss her,” she says, lip wobbling, and John pulls her in close to his side, hugs her tightly when she buries her face in his jacket. 

“I know,” he answers. “It’s okay to miss her, and wish she were here. I wish she was here too, at least then she’d bloody well know what to buy.”

It gets a snort out of her, wet and stuffed, and he presses a kiss gently into her hair. “I’m sorry I’m a bit rubbish at this,” he says, gently brushing the tears from her face, her hair back from her eyes. “And I’m sorry I’m not your mum.”

“It’s okay,” she says, though he can hear the lie well enough.

 

.

When Sherlock leaves Bart’s he finds he has thirteen missed phone calls, three voicemails, and five text messages, all from John. His first thought is to wonder if someone important is dead; the text messages dismiss that notion, because based on their increasingly threatening nature the only person in danger is Sherlock. The voicemails don’t help much either, John terse and incredibly uncomfortable about something involving his children, which means it’s probably related to sex or in the girls’ cases, their biological parents. _Oh_ , he realizes, climbing into a cab. How ridiculous. It’s absurd that the natural maturation of their daughter should cause such an incredible degree of distress.

_On my way. Try not to panic over  
daughter’s normal development. _

_SH_

He gets a text back less than thirty seconds later, which considering how long it took John to text _before_ his shoulder injury is a testament to what must be his incandescent rage. 

_Come home. Now._

Sherlock sighs.

He walks into a house that is eerily silent - the other kids are still at school, and the sound of Kaden snoring lightly in his portable crib is the only real noise. Sherlock turns the corner and finds John in the kitchen, staring into a mug of tea with far too much intensity. “Well?”

John looks up at him, bleary eyed from staring so intently at something so close. “I’m going to murder you,” he tells Sherlock calmly.

“So you keep saying, though I fail to see how Lucy’s reproductive cycle is my fault.”

“How did you even -- forget it, never mind.” John blows out a breath and shoves the mug away, where the tea sloshes over the side and onto the table. “Stop being so calm about this. You didn’t have to pick her up from the school in tears, and take her through the feminine care aisle, and listen to her -- Sherlock, she wants her _mother_. She doesn’t -- she’s got a trauma history, and now, it was--”

He looks like he’s about to hyperventilate. “Do you need a paper bag?” Sherlock asks, which he thinks is rather considerate.

“No I don’t need a damn bag, you idiot,” John snaps, loud enough that if Kaden were a normal baby he’d have been startled awake. Luckily he’d had two years of sleeping in the face of an unholy amount of noise, so he didn’t even flinch. “I need you to be helpful and do something to make her feel better, so she won’t hate us forever because we both have a penis.”

“Each,” Sherlock says. When John looks at him blankly Sherlock explains, “We each have a penis. It’s not as though there’s only one between us to share.”

John tilts his head and Sherlock stands up sharply. “I’ll just go check on her, then.”

“You do that," John says darkly.

The girls’ room is suspiciously quiet, so Sherlock braces himself and knocks. “Lucille.”

“Go away,” she says, and then two seconds later flings the door open anyway and throws herself at him, dark head crashing painfully into his sternum. “Papa this is _awful_.”

“It’s a perfectly natural event,” he tells her. “All it means is you’re developing normally.”

“It’s like when I was little--”

“No it’s not,” he tells her strongly, and uses his hands to tilt her face up so she can’t ignore him. “This is nothing like that. This is not a bad thing.”

“It feels like a bad thing,” she says, but the panicky look in her eyes is receding a little. “I told John I wanted my mum. I think I hurt his feelings.”

He lets her face go so she can bury herself against him again. “Of course you wish she were here, you’re a child and you’ve lost a parent. You never stop wanting them back.”

She shifts in his arms, damn perceptive girl. “You still miss your papa?”

“I do.” 

She moves again, hugs him hard like she’s trying to comfort him, which is ridiculous and clearly John’s influence. “Tell me what happened.”

“It was really embarrassing,” she tells his shirt. “We went to Tesco and he was reading all the boxes.” She makes it sound like he went on the speaker to announce it to the store at large, and maybe shared her glaringly obvious crush on Kevin Hollister as well.

“You could always use the ones in my lab,” he suggests.

She pulls back to look up at him. “Why do you have pads in your lab?”

“Tampons. They’re for an experiment.”

She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t want experiment tampons, Papa. And Dad said not to use them yet anyway, but I don’t know why.”

“He thinks you’d be uncomfortable walking around with something in your vagina,” he explains, and blinks in surprise at the speed she shoves away with him. 

“Oh my _God_ , Papa. Seriously.”

“What?”

“You are such a freakazoid,” she complains, and shuts the door in his face. 

He glares at the wood. “You know I don’t like it when you mutate words like that.”

She makes a high pitched noise of distress, and throws something -- probably a trainer -- at the door. Back to the status quo, then. 

 

3.  
Dinner is, by necessity, almost always a bizarre self-serve buffet. John will generally force one of the kids to help (on a semi-random schedule usually determined by who was most recently arguing with whom) and people will wander in and out, grabbing plates or bowls and wandering back to their temporarily suspended activities. There was a phase when Andrew was adamant about always being the one to help -- a period that was unsurprisingly timed with his horrid food experimentation phase -- but it seems that time has finally passed, to everyone's relief.

" _Monica_!" Lucy shrieks. It was the kind of sound that signaled police cars, or sent normal parents, or people who hadn't actually _met_ Lucy, running. John, as it is, just washes his hands and calmly dries them off.

"You are disgusting, _oh my God_!" Lucy's ranting continues from their upstairs bedroom.

John walks over to the bottom of the stairs. "Don't make me come up there!" 

It was not an idle threat; he was not fond of stairs, and no one got a good deal if he was forced to make extra trips. Lucy appeared at the top of the staircase, her entire posture screaming 'Sherlock'. "This child is disgusting, Daddy, and I can _not_ be expected to live with her."

"You sound ridiculous," John answered. "What's she done now to so offend you?"

"There is _food_. She's been hiding it in the closet, and it's rotting, _it's a box of disease and it was next to my trainers_."

"Monica," John calls.

When no second child is forthcoming Lucy takes it upon herself to play bounty hunter and track her sister down. "Hello, get out here, Daddy wants to discuss your disgusting habits."

"Lucy quit it,” John orders, and though Lucy looks murderous she finally gets her mouth to shut.

Monica finally appears behind her sister, looking angry and rebellious and more than a little frightened. "Come down here, please -- and bring the food."

When she makes it into the kitchen John's sitting at the table, cutting vegetables. She sidles into the opposing seat and drops her box onto the table.

John doesn't look up. "Every other day you have to clean it out."

"What?" Monica answers, and the fact that he's confused her is the only reason she's talking at all.

John stops cutting and looks up. "If you keep food in there any longer it's going to rot, and that's not sanitary. So every other day, alright?"

She looks at him warily, but nods.

John starts cutting again. "Sherlock can check for you if you like."

He can feel her staring at him, but all she says is "Yes, please."

"Okay then. Go wash your hands and you can help me."

She stands up and makes to go towards the sink but instead swivels and flings herself at John, who immediately drops the knife and wonders if he should be warning her about knife-safety, but before he can do so much as pat her back gently and start in on the lecture, she's let him go and is off to wash her hands. 

 

4.  
"Papa," Kaden starts, nervous as all hell.

"Next week," Papa interrupts, without looking away from one of his bee hives.

"What?" Kaden asks. He really wishes his father was looking at him, but then again maybe not, this was going to be pretty tough without--

"We'll take you to see your birth mother next week, if you like," his father says. He then hums at something the bees are doing, Kaden has no idea what and really doesn't need to know, his father is weird and also apparently a mind-reader.

"How did you know?" Kaden asks, baffled.

"You're not exactly Fort Knox, Kaden," Papa says. He stands up straight and turns to Kaden, pulling the veil up over his hat. His father, the part time police consultant, part time bee-keeper. Kaden still hasn't found a good way of explaining it to anyone who asks, though now that they live in Sussex it helps matters tremendously, because they're just the quirky family on the block, not the family with body parts in the fridge. 

Papa looks at Kaden -- they're the same height now, though Dad says Kaden's not done yet, that he might even outgrow Andrew, which is so weird, but also kind of cool -- with the patient expression that means he's waiting for Kaden to catch up.

"Why next week? How do you know where she is? Have you talked to her?" Kaden starts rambling.

Thankfully his papa cuts him off before he stops making sense altogether. "Because that's when she's available, I had your uncle track her down, and yes."

This is not how Kaden expected this conversation to go. "When did you do all this?" he asks, confused and weirdly, strangely upset. Papa doesn't seem angry though, which is good -- Kaden hadn't even wanted to think about telling Dad, was hoping maybe Papa could do it for him. He loves his parents, they're all he's ever known, and he'd never _want_ anyone else, but he's sixteen now, almost seventeen, and he was leaving for Uni next year, and how could he go out on his own without knowing who he was, who he _really_ was?

Papa sighs like Kaden is making him be redundant. "You've been looking at reunification websites for weeks and trying to find a way to ask. It was only a matter of time, so I started making arrangements."

Kaden very deliberately looks at the bees. "So you're not... upset?"

"No. And for the record you're not giving your dad enough credit. He will understand."

Kaden looks back up to see his father's expression and blanches. "It's not that, it's -- I don't want to hurt his feelings, that's all.” 

He shrugs, more uncomfortable than he's been in ages, since the first time someone found out who his uncle was, or stared at him for looking different than his parents.

"He's the adult, Kaden, he doesn't need your protection," Papa says, and though it's a stern reprimand it also makes Kaden feel better.

"Next week?" he asks.

"Next week," Papa confirms. He turns back to his bees, which is Kaden's cue to go, but there's something fidgety in his chest, his throat, and he has to ask--

"What was she like?"

Papa pauses, turns and looks up at him. His eyes are sad, so sad. "Like you," he says, after a while.

Kaden scratches at the back of his head, turns, and flees the scene as an itchy, tight feeling crawls up his throat. Papa thinks he's silly and far too soft as it is, no reason for Kaden to have a meltdown in front of him. He darts into the house, hears his dad call his name in surprise, but can't stop, not until he's in his room, the door shut behind him. Just one week, he thinks. A whole week. Only a week.

He stays flat on his bed, face buried in his pillow, until his dad comes knocking on the door. 

 

.

It's always funny to him how the life changing moments with their children are somehow always just like this -- the three of them in a car: John, and Sherlock, and their child in the middle. Andrew set the bar long ago when he had his first eye surgery, so tiny in his car carrier John had fought down at least three separate panic attacks on the way to the hospital. Since then they've had dozens of moments like it: fetching Lucy when she ran away to his mother's house, rushing Monica to A&E when she got food poisoning, the night Andrew almost got arrested. There've been happy moments, too, of course -- Monica's wedding, and the night their grandson was born -- but it's odd how this feels a bit like that, and a bit not.

Kaden, for all his bravado, is kind right to the marrow of himself; a sweet, gentle spirit. John's been expecting this for some time, so when Sherlock mentions why their son has been so secretive, he isn't surprised in the least. He's only surprised it took this long.

"Alright then, love?" he asks. London is fast approaching, and they'd be in the city in ten minutes. They'd already made arrangements at the Plaza, but John half thinks that they won't be necessary. He hopes, for his son's sake, he's wrong.

Kaden shrugs a bit, nervous -- he's wearing the scarf Jeremy gave him, and despite John's very vocal reservations on all things 'boyfriend', he's glad that his son has something to bolster him up a bit. "Alright," Kaden replies, clenching and unclenching his fingers in the soft weave. "You think she's going to like me?"

"That's an absurd question," Sherlock replies, and if John hadn't known him for the better part of three decades he wouldn't have caught the expression in his eyes -- he's worried. Not about their son being taken away, because that would simply never happen, but about letting this unknown variable into their lives. A person who had put a newborn infant in with the kitchen garbage; a person who had thrown _Kaden_ away, in every sense of the word.

Their son knew that, had known it for nearly two years now, and John doesn't want to relive that time, not when Kaden had looked like a kicked dog for weeks and weeks. He'd expected the search for the birth mother to begin then, but John's surgery and recovery had put a hold on more than his own life.

Kaden makes a low sound and Sherlock puts an arm around him, pulling him in close. John looks over Kaden's head, meets Sherlock's eyes and sees the same thoughts in them. They'd both spoken to the woman, Josephine, and had Mycroft's file with them -- at least an inch thick -- but it didn't make him feel better, none of it.

 

.

Kaden realizes, the very moment that they come to a stop in front of his real mum's flat and they climb out of the car, that this is a mistake.

"I don't know if I can do this," he mumbles, and feels sick, like he's going to throw up. It's a bit like masochism or something, because she hadn't wanted him, hadn't wanted him so much that he'd nearly died and it was only because Papa and Dad had been on a case, and Dad had been looking through the skips in that particular neighborhood, that he wasn't at the landfill. The feeling he'd gotten when Papa and Dad had told him (or, at least, confirmed what he'd already learned on the internet) had made his skin crawl, like he'd seen his own grave. Even now, two years after the fact, it still has the power to make him sick.

"I don't know why we're here," Kaden says, voice gone shaky. 

It's hard to breathe, and Dad grips his arm when he sways, and Papa says, "You told me why we're here."

"What?"

"You. You came and told me what you wanted from this," Papa says, and he's right, of course he is, he always is.

"I... I wanted to know about my birth family," he says, squeezing his eyes shut until the sick feeling recedes. "I wanted to know who my mum was."

"Nothing has changed," Papa says. He's never looked so sad, and it hurts, all the way inside of himself. "This is simply the hard part, Kaden, facing the unknown."

He wants to fall apart, but here, now, is where he proves himself an adult to his parents. Swallowing has never hurt so much, like a knot is inside his throat, and he works his jaw until he stops feeling like he's going to start bawling. Instead, he accepts a hug from each of them, and Dad's arm around his back, and they walk, together, into the building.

The flat is on the third floor, 36C. There's a wreath on the door for fall, and a quirky welcome mat -- things his mother had bought, things his mother had decorated her door with.

He feels like he's out of his body, looking down on himself when he rings the door.

 

5.  
Mycroft loves his nieces and nephews.

For a man such as he -- that is, a man of serious temperament – the emotion was highly irregular, a veritable conundrum. One was expected to love one’s siblings, of course, but the offspring of one’s siblings was another subject entirely. He and Sherlock had six uncles and aunts between them, four of which they’d never met, one whom had died before their birth, and the last which wanted nothing to do with them, and of which there was no love lost. Mycroft truly had no prior experience to work with, no script to read from.

He hadn’t expected it, but when his brother-in-law had sets his nephew in his arms, small and wrinkled and horrifically ugly, squalling his anger at the various goings on around him, Mycroft falls inexplicably in love with him; so in love, in fact, that his first order of business after leaving the hospital, and after discreetly wiping at his eyes with his kerchief, was to re-purpose one of his satellites entirely for his nephew.

He is christened Andrew David William Watson Holmes, before God and Queen (the latter of which quite literally), future Earl of Abingdon, and as Mycroft watched the child baptized there in his mother’s garden he thought of his own uncles, and all they’d missed, and considered them irrevocably stupid because there was nowhere Mycroft would rather be.

He operates under the assumption that the feeling could never be duplicated, until the day he meets Lucille, hardly four years old and so devastatingly ruined, with her serious eyes and her serious mouth and her ever-so-serious continence. 

His brother introduces her as Lucy Holmes. With absolutely no effort at all Mycroft falls in love with her too, as if she were his by blood.

The years go by and Sherlock and John add to their brood, sweet baby Kaden and little Monica, the former tossed away like so much garbage, found hours-old in a skip, and the latter used by her drug-addicted mother in a manner so heinous that Mycroft had created an entirely new task force within the MI6 to flush out others like her.

Mycroft loves each of them too, as deeply and unendingly as he loved Andrew and Lucy, for he is of a mind that the heart and soul of each child, regardless of their parentage, is the reflection of Sherlock and John, that they had been born to this earth to be the children of his brothers, to be brought up by them and taught by them and loved by them.

He and Mahdavi tried for children themselves, for a long time. They went to doctors, and fertility specialists, and herbalists, and Mahdavi conceived three times, all miscarriages. After the third they stopped trying. Mycroft doesn’t think he can stand to watch his wife fall apart again.

It’s only when they begin proceedings to adopt a child that Mahdavi conceives again. Mahdavi goes to her doctor’s appointments and they wait, cautious, but without much hope. They do not buy anything for the baby, nor do they speak of the pregnancy, as if the very subject were sacred or taboo. In fact, Mycroft doesn’t believe it’s going to happen at all until Mahdavi says, one day in her third trimester, “Mycroft, how far along am I?”

“Seven months and twenty one days,” he replies automatically, glancing up over his newspaper to find her staring at him, pale and pinched with one hand over her belly, and he comes to his feet so quickly he knocks over the tea table.

His son is born in the early hours of the morning, after an emergency C-section. He is small, terribly small, with a head of dark curls like his grandmother, Mycroft’s eyes, and Mahdavi’s beautiful skin. Mycroft spends the first five minutes of his son’s life crying like a child, and holding his wife who had brought this beautiful creation into the world.

“He’s tiny,” Lucy says, three weeks later. His son has gained weight in those weeks, and he doesn’t look quite so frightfully small as he had at his birth. 

“Handsome,” John corrects. He hadn’t been able to set the baby down since they’d arrived, and Mycroft secretly wonders how long it would be before there was a new addition to Sherlock’s house. “Any thoughts on a name yet?” he asks of Madhavi, next to him.

“Some,” she hedges, and Sherlock made a rude noise from the chair across from them. 

“Oh, don’t tell me, Mycroft.”

“Yes, but--”

“You cannot, you simply _cannot_. I won’t hear of it. I’ll call you in as a child abuser, see that I don’t.”

“What?” John asks. “What is it?”

“He means to name his son after our grandfather,” Sherlock says with no little disgust. “I thought you and I were going to break the tradition, Mycroft.”

“What are you both going on about?” John demands.

Sherlock glares at him and Mycroft, in a jovial enough mood, sighs and relents. “John, surely you’ve noticed that our names are somewhat… odd.”

“Well."

“It’s been a tradition in our family since--"

“Our grandfather was named Hogarth Holmes,” Sherlock intones with gravitas.

After a moment filled with stunned silence, Lucy explodes. “Hogarth Holmes? Are you insane? Uncle Mycroft that won’t do, it won’t do at _all_.”

“Why not?” Mycroft asks, tickling the baby’s cheek gently. “I think it’s very masculine.”

“You’re going to have all the kids calling him Hoggy-Hoggy-Hogwarts. And asking him where his fur coat is. And when he’s going to teach them Russian. You simply musn’t,” Monica says from Mahdavi’s side, where she’s curled up. Mahdavi is smirking at him as if she’d planned the entire visit for entirely this reason. It’s just one of the many reasons why he’d married her – she knew how to get around him better than anyone ever had, without it seeming like she was in the first place. It was devious and cunning and oh, how he loved his wife.

He gave her one last look, and her smirk curved ever-broader, until she buried it in Monica’s curls. “Hmm, how about Humphrey then?”

Andrew, who until that moment had been quietly going about dismantling the toaster for the fourth time (he upgraded it on his every visit) chimes in with, “Humpy Holmes.”

Mycroft frowns. “Sherrinford?”

“Unless he’s a hobbit, no,” Lucy says, belly down on the sofa-arm, her legs kicking to keep her balance.

“Herbert?”

“Sherbert?” Kaden asks, biscuit crumbs glued all over his chin. "Daddy, sherbert?"

Sherlock crosses the room to take the baby from John, who promptly scoops Kaden up. “A proper English baby needs a proper English name,” he says, gently tucking the blanket under the baby’s chin. “If you’re both set on something traditional, for God’s sake don’t let it be _our_ sort of traditional. Name your son after a king.”

Mahdavi, who in fact had been pushing for just such, grins at him serenely, and Mycroft scowls back. “I don’t like the monarchy.”

“No one likes the monarchy. In the whole of Britain, no one has ever said, ‘you know, I think our king is a fairly nice chap’,” John says. “How about Henry? Or Richard?”

“Arthur,” Andrew says from the floor, tongue caught between his teeth. “His name is Arthur.”

Mycroft blinks, and Mahdavi goes to speak only to stop herself, a small smile curling her mouth.

“Well,” Mycroft says finally, and looked over his brother’s shoulder at his son. “Arthur it is then.”


End file.
